It is critical that companies ensure that their advertising is effective and achieving its goals such as marketing long term brand health.

Clearly one way of achieving this is by ascertaining if there is an impact on your product’s or service’s sales. However, not all advertising is intended to generate a short-term sales effect – its key aims may be to:

• Generate awareness of a new brand
• Build a certain image for the brand
• Remind people of the brand
• Change people’s attitudes about the brand, etc.

Advertising tracking enables marketers to gauge whether their advertising is achieving its objectives, as well as keeping track of competitive activity. Continuous tracking in an active category allows for just that kind of market monitoring.

Typically conducted amongst buyers of a category, measures included in an advertising tracking study may include:

• Brand awareness – unprompted and prompted
• Advertising awareness
• Brand health measures such as trial, regular usage/purchase, brand used/bought most often
• Message communication – what message do consumers think the ad was communicating?
• Brand imagery
• Demographics

By building a comprehensive database of consumer response to advertising over time, it is possible to develop a model for evaluating how efficient advertising has been in terms of media weight required to achieve the communication objectives. This knowledge can then be applied to subsequent campaigns.

The importance of advertising tracking is demonstrated with ACNielsen | Winning Brands™, a brand management tool to help you maximise the equity of your brands.

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